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Time to ditch astronomical time

By Alison George

Throw away your sundial! The world’s “time director”, Felicitas Arias, says we need to fundamentally change the way we measure how time passes

Next month there will be a vote on whether to fundamentally change the world’s time standard. Why?Coordinated universal time (UTC) is the time scale used all over the world for time coordination. It was established in 1972, based on atomic clocks, and was the successor of astronomical time, which is based on the Earth’s rotation. But since the atomic time scale drifts from the astronomical one, 1-second steps were added whenever necessary. In …